Literature Compass 13/4 (2016): 227–235, 10.1111/lic3.12322 Christian Science and American Literary History L. Ashley Squires * New Economic School Abstract The religious turn in American literary studies has produced new interest in religious movements from the turn of the 20th century, and due to the opening of archives, Christian Science is one possible direc- tion that research in this area might turn. Yet until very recently, literary scholarship related to Christian Science has been extremely f lawed, due mostly to over-reliance on a few problematic sources. This article offers an overview of the issues that have impacted that research while suggesting that promising work is beginning to emerge. In 1899, a Christian Science healer named Josephine Woodbury sparked a nation-wide scandal by suing her former teacher, Mary Baker Eddy, for libel. 1 Eddy founded Christian Science in 1866, claiming to have healed herself from a fatal injury by reading her Bible and meditating on her conviction that sickness, sin, and suffering were illusions. In the decades that followed, she spread her doctrine and her healing methods – which involved helping the patient realize that God created them to be perfect and therefore that they could not be really sick – beyond New England and across the continent. By the end of the century, Christian Science was one of the fastest growing and most controversial religious groups in the United States with a growing transatlantic presence. A variety of people, including European aristocrats, women of modest means looking to make a living, and neurasthenic novelists like Frances Hodgson Burnett and Theodore Dreiser visited Christian Science healers and studied the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, despite (perhaps even because of ) the fact that the movement was denounced by reli- gious and medical authorities alike. Josephine Woodbury was one of many fascinating women to have risen up through the ranks of Christian Science. She traveled throughout the United States and, through the power of her magnetic personality, built a following of her own, a community of Christian Scientists who sometimes practiced asceticism and celibacy (at Woodbury’s behest) and had mystic experi- ences. Due to her unsanctioned cult of personality and outlandish behavior – which included instructing her students to venerate her son as the second coming of Christ – Woodbury was eventually excommunicated from the Mother Church in Boston. Her libel suit against Eddy, rooted in comments made during the Christian Science leader’s annual Communion Message, was dismissed for lack of evidence. But this did not stop Woodbury and her lawyer, Frederick Peabody, from becoming prominent anti-Christian Science speakers and pamphleteers, provid- ing information on Christian Science to various notable New Englanders. One of these was Samuel Clemens, whose wife and daughters had been involved with Christian Science and who was working on a set of articles on the religio-medical sect for Cosmopolitan and North American Review. 2 Peabody and Woodbury also contributed heavily to the work of a group of writers and editors at McClure’s who were fact-checking a biography of Mary Baker Eddy to be published as a series in 1907 and 1908. At the head of the editing team was Willa Cather. That Mark Twain once wrote a very strange book about Christian Science and that Willa Cather edited a biography of Mary Baker Eddy has long been a point of curiosity among © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd